Dreyfus affair

This article is part of
the Dreyfus affair
series.
Investigation and arrest
Trial and conviction
Picquart's investigations
Other investigations
Public scandal
"J'accuse...!" - Zola
Resolution
Alfred Dreyfus

The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal which divided France from the 1890s to the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Jewish background who was in advanced training with the Army's General Staff. Alfred Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment, which he began to serve in solitary confinement on Devil's Island in French Guiana.

Two years later, in 1896, the real culprit was brought to light and identified: a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. However, French high-level military officials dismissed or ignored this new evidence which exonerated Alfred Dreyfus. Thus, in January 1898, military judges unanimously acquitted Esterhazy on the second day of his trial. Worse, French military counter-intelligence officers fabricated false documents designed to secure Dreyfus' conviction as a spy for Germany. They were all eventually exposed, in large part due to a resounding public intervention by writer Emile Zola in January 1898. The case had to be re-opened, and Dreyfus was brought back from Guiana in 1899 to be tried again. The intense political and judicial scandal that ensued divided French society between those who supported Dreyfus (the Dreyfusards[1]) and those who condemned him (the anti-Dreyfusards, such as Edouard Drumont director of La Libre Parole and Hubert-Joseph Henry).

Eventually, all the accusations against Alfred Dreyfus were demonstrated to be baseless. Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army in 1906. He later served during the whole of World War I, ending his service with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.

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Main article: History of the Jews in France
See also: Religion in France and Roman Catholicism in France

Antisemitism in France during the latter part of the 19th century was openly displayed in print and in public speeches by politicians and journalists belonging to the far right of the political spectrum. After the formal inception of the French Third Republic in 1871, in the 1880s nationalist politicians such as Georges Boulanger, Edouard Drumont (founder of the Antisemitic League of France) and Paul Déroulède (founder of Ligue des Patriotes) sought to capitalize on the new fervor for a unified Catholic France. Since 1892, the anti-Semitic publication "La Libre Parole" had published highly defamatory contributions called "Les Juifs dans l'Armée" or "Jews in the Army". Consequently and in response, Jewish officers in the French Army such as Andre Cremieu-Foa and Armand Mayer had reacted by challenging to a duel the authors of these defamations. Captain Mayer lost his life in a duel against Marquis de Mores in June 1892, thus creating a major scandal anticipating that of the Dreyfus Affair. War Minister Freycinet had intervened in the Chambre des Députés (the French lower house) in these terms: "Gentlemen, in the Army, we do not recognize Jews, Protestants or Catholics, we only recognize French officers." However French Jews, in general, were later described by the historian George L. Mosse as being often perceived as a "nation within a nation".[2]

Nonetheless the situation of the Jewish community in France, in the 1890s, was better than that of Jews in certain other countries of continental Europe, such as Germany and worst of all in Czarist Russia. All French Jews had been fully integrated into the nation by law since the French Revolution of 1789 and Napoleon's First Empire. As a result they generally held higher positions in the government and the military than in most other European countries. Later on in France, the political changes resulting from the Dreyfus Affair brought about the 1905 Law on the Separation of Church and State. It put an end to the favored status of the Catholic Church dating from Emperor Napoleon I's Concordat with the Vatican. This placed French Protestants and French Jews on the same level as Roman Catholics, with regards to the Law and to public financing (or lack thereof) of places of worship.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a graduate of both École polytechnique and the École Supérieure de Guerre, was a promising young artillery officer. His high exit rankings from these elite institutions had led to a training position on the French Army's General Staff in January 1893. Alfred Dreyfus' family background was solidly upper middle class and rested on a successful family-owned textile manufacture in Mulhouse, a city in Alsace that is close to the German and Swiss borders. After the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/1871 and the annexation of Alsace by the German Empire, part of the Dreyfus family had chosen to retain its French nationality and moved permanently to Paris. Its younger members, including 12-year-old Alfred Dreyfus jr. and his brother Mathieu Dreyfus, grew up there.

Arrest and accusations

Abruptly in October 1894, shortly after he had begun his training assignment in the "3ème Bureau" of the General Staff, Captain Dreyfus was arrested and charged with passing military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. He was convicted of treason by a military tribunal in December 1894 and sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement on Devil's Island, a prison island off the coast of French Guiana. Captain Dreyfus's conviction was based on a handwritten list (the bordereau) offering access to secret French military information. This list had been retrieved from the waste paper basket of the German military attaché in Paris, Maximilian Von Schwartzkoppen, by a French cleaning woman and spy in the employ of French military counter-intelligence (the so-called "Section de Statistique" led by a Lt Col Sandherr). Her name is widely recognized and quoted since the early 1900s as Marie Bastian (born Caudron).

The list, or "bordereau", appeared to implicate an artillery officer since it proposed access to technical information concerning a recent French artillery weapon, the Modèle 1890 120mm Baquet howitzer. Dreyfus was suspected because of his artillery training, his Alsatian origins, his yearly trips to his then-German home town of Mülhausen (now the French town of Mulhouse in Alsace) to visit his ailing father, and because he was a Jew (a negative connotation for the anti-semitic Sandherr and also for some high-level officers at the "4ème Bureau" of the General Staff). Above all, the handwriting on the bordereau resembled that of Dreyfus. However, by the time the High Command realized it could not find substantial evidence against Dreyfus (apart from the "bordereau" over which forensic experts could not agree that it was Dreyfus' handwriting) it had become impossible to withdraw the prosecution without a scandal that would have brought down the highest levels of the French Army.[3] The obstinacy of the Army's General Staff in pressing unfounded charges against Captain Dreyfus led to criminal activities by officers belonging to French military counter-intelligence, including the fabrication of false documents designed to incriminate Dreyfus. The protracted cover-up of such activities by highly placed members of the Army's General Staff is at the very heart of the Dreyfus Affair. While there were undoubtedly anti-Semitic overtones to these actions, aggravating the situation was the fact that Dreyfus, although generally praised by his superiors, was not popular with some of his colleagues because of his aloof personality and comparatively wealthy background. His father had died in 1893 and had left him a small fortune. Captain Dreyfus' personal income, in addition to that of his wife, exceeded that of a general officer in the French Army (Doise, 1994).

Judicial errors and obstructions of justice

The subsequent court-martial was notable for its numerous errors of procedure. For example, the defense was not made aware of a secret dossier that the prosecution had provided to the military judges (Bredin, 1986). Withholding this dossier from the defense was illegal under French law. The French military historian Jean Doise, a retired officer in the French Army's General Staff, has published evidence (Doise, 1994) that led him to propose the conclusion that Dreyfus may have been used, at least initially, as a decoy by French military counter-intelligence (the "Section de Statistique" led by Lt Colonel Sandherr). According to Doise,[3] the intense prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus may have been initially designed to mislead German espionage into believing that it had stumbled onto highly sensitive artillery information.

It has long been demonstrated, in fact since 1896 by Lt Col Georges Picquart, that the torn up bordereau used to incriminate Alfred Dreyfus had in reality been handwritten and delivered to the German Embassy by someone else: a French infantry officer of Hungarian descent, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. At the top of the list on the bordereau was a promise to deliver to the German Military Attaché technical information concerning the oleo-pneumatic recoil mechanism of a new French howitzer (the 120 mm Baquet). Esterhazy had either hoped to extract money from the German Attaché or had, as proposed by Jean Doise (1984), deliberately planted a deception into German hands to throw them off the Canon de 75 modèle 1897 field gun project. The new French 75 prototype and its highly advanced oleo-pneumatic recoil mechanism were in secret progress at that very same time, while the 120mm Baquet had already been earmarked for early termination. If Esterhazy was a double-agent, it would explain why he, although unmistakably identified by Lt Col Picquart as the author of the "bordereau", was acquitted by French military Justice in January 1898 and allowed to retire in England with a pension. Moreover, lieutenant Walsin-Esterhazy had served in 1881 and 1882 as a German translator on the staff of the "Section de Statistique", at the same time and in the same office than Major Joseph Hubert Henry, that same officer later to be caught forging evidence against Dreyfus. These career overlaps are well documented and took place during the early part of Esterhazy's career, long before the Dreyfus Affair.[4] The point is that the two officers had been working in the same French military counter espionage group twelve years before the Dreyfus Affair and thus knew each other quite well.

However, the theory that Esterhazy was not exactly what he appears to be—a man who sold military secrets to the Germans to cover his many debts and as revenge against France for denying him the promotion and appointments he wanted—has several problems. If Esterhazy was actually a double-agent working for Sandherr at the time that the bordereau was written, Sandherr's reaction to the discovery of the bordereau makes no sense. If the bordereau was intended to deceive the Germans, why not allow the Germans to think they had stolen the information undetected? Esterhazy's obvious sheltering from being convicted in January 1898 was likely not to protect a double agent, but rather to justify the original sentencing pronounced against Dreyfus in December 1894.

These recent exposures by professional French Army historians further confirm what had already been brought to light since 1896 by Lt Col Georges Picquart : the criminal character of the machinations devised by Lt Col Sandherr and his small group (notably Major Hubert-Joseph Henry, Captain Lauth and archivist Gribelin) at the "Section de Statistique". Because these counter-intelligence officers operated within a loosely supervised bureaucracy distinct from the regular military intelligence section (the 2ème bureau ) at the French War Ministry, they drifted into forging evidence against Dreyfus (the "faux Henry") and perverting the course of justice (Bredin, 1986 and general Andre Bach, 2004). This happened because Lt Col Sandherr had been encouraged over the years to report directly and secretly to the office of the politically appointed War Minister himself (General Auguste Mercier who occupied this key position until 1896). It is now further shown (Bach, 2004) that General Auguste Mercier was the responsible party in initiating this chain of events, and later in pressing for the cover-up of the Dreyfus miscarriage of justice. That he had been inspired at the very beginning by general Deloye, who directed French Artillery and supervised the French 75's secret development, is a plausible but unprovable speculation.[5]

Dreyfus cashiered in a public ceremony.

Alfred Dreyfus was tried in 1894 on charges of espionage and found guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison on Devil's Island in French Guiana where he had to endure debilitating solitary confinement in a small hut for nearly five years. Before his deportation to Guiana he had to undergo a formal degradation ceremony in the École Militaire in Paris where he was publicly cashiered: his rank marks and buttons were ripped off his uniform and his sabre was broken.[6] Then, in June 1899, the case was reopened following the uncovering of exonerating evidence which is reviewed earlier in this note and due to the fact that Dreyfus had been denied due process during the initial court-martial. France's Court of Cassation quashed his conviction and ordered a new court-martial. Despite the new evidence presented at his second military trial, Dreyfus was re-convicted in September and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was subsequently pardoned by President Émile Loubet and freed, but would not be formally exonerated until July 12, 1906, when the Court of Cassation annulled his second conviction.

He was thereafter formally reinstated as a major in the army in July 1906 and made a Knight of the Légion d'Honneur. However, he decided, of his own accord, to retire in July 1907. Seven years passed until Dreyfus was recalled to active duty in August 1914, at the age of 55. He served mostly behind the lines of the Western Front as a Lieutenant-Colonel of Artillery, but also performed front line duties in 1917, notably at Verdun and on the Chemin des Dames. Finally, Alfred Dreyfus was raised to the rank of Officer of the Légion d'Honneur in July 1919. This elevation constituted official recognition that he had served his country in time of war with distinction and well beyond the normal retirement age. However, his personal life and that of his family, not to speak of his military career, had been deeply damaged by the baseless accusations made against him since 1894.

Scandal and aftermath

L'Aurore's front page on January 13, 1898 features Émile Zola's open letter to the French President Félix Faure denouncing the miscarriage of justice
This cartoon of a French family dinner by caricaturist Caran d'Ache illustrates the divisions in French society during the Dreyfus affair. In the top panel, the host says, “Above all, let us not speak of the Dreyfus affair!” The bottom panel shows the dinner party in disorder: “They have spoken of it.”

The Dreyfus affair became one of the gravest crises to rock the French Third Republic. "The Affair" deeply divided the country into Dreyfusards (supporters of Dreyfus) and anti-Dreyfusards. Generally speaking, royalists and conservatives (the "right wing") were anti-Dreyfusards, while Dreyfusards were socialists, republicans and anticlericalists.

On the other hand, and contrary to common belief, the French Army at the end of the 19th century was not an anti-Semitic institution. Dreyfus's Jewish background was well-known, yet he had been admitted to the most selective military schools in the country and had been assigned to a sensitive position in the General Staff. During that same period, there were over 250 career officers professing the Jewish faith (Birnbaum, 1998) in the French Army, including many colonels and at least one general officer, General Samuel Naquet-Laroque (1843–1921), who occupied a high position in the state armament industries. That same period also saw the rise of Lt Colonel Mardochee-Georges Valabregue (1854–1934), an artilleryman from the École Polytechnique and an observant Jew. He became Commander in Chief of the École Supérieure de Guerre in 1905 and a full general during World War I. Another high ranking French officer of Jewish descent was General Jules Mordacq (1868-1943). He was a captain at the time of the Dreyfus Affair but his own career continued to progress normally. He became a highly decorated general and divisional commander in the field during WW1. General Mordacq was then chosen by Prime Minister Clemenceau, in early 1918, to become his principal military liaison with the High Command. The General remained in this important cabinet position with Clemenceau until the end of the war, in November 1918. He also assisted Clemenceau during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

The writer Émile Zola can be credited with having exposed the affair to the general public in a famously incendiary open letter to President Félix Faure to which the French journalist and politician Georges Clemenceau had affixed the headline "J'accuse!" (I accuse!); it was published January 13, 1898 in the maiden issue of the newspaper L'Aurore (The Dawn). It had the effect of a bomb — in the words of historian Barbara Tuchman, "It was one of the great commotions of history." Émile Zola's intent was to force his own prosecution for libel so that the emerging facts of the Dreyfus case could be thoroughly aired. In this he succeeded. He was convicted, appealed, was retried, and, before hearing the result, fled to England on the advice of his counsel and friends, returning to Paris in June 1899 when he heard that Dreyfus's trial was to be reviewed.

Zola's worldwide fame and respected reputation brought international attention to what he considered Dreyfus's unjust treatment. However, most of the work of exposing the errors in Dreyfus's conviction was done by four people: Dreyfus's brother Mathieu, who fought a lonely campaign for several years; Jewish journalist and anarchist Bernard Lazare, who first used the word J'accuse in L’Eclair, on 15 September 1896, a paper which he rewrote under the title The Dreyfus Affair – A Miscarriage of Justice, published in Belgium in November 1896; then Lt.Colonel Marie-Georges Picquart, a senior infantry officer who had replaced Lt. Colonel Sandherr, now deceased, at the helm of French Military Counter-intelligence; and the Alsatian vice-president of the French Senate, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner. They all worked resolutely to make the case for a revision of Dreyfus's conviction by the French military justice system. Picquart himself, who had demonstrated that the real author of the "bordereau" was Major Esterhazy, was reassigned to a post in the south of Tunisia in December 1896. This was not necessarily an inappropriate assignment, since Picquart had originally been transferred from a North African Tirailleur regiment to lead military counter intelligence in Paris. The intention now, however, was to get Picquart away from Paris in order to silence him. It was, in fact, a deliberate obstruction of justice by highly placed members of the French military leadership.

The affair saw the emergence of the "intellectuals" — academics and others with high intellectual achievements who took positions on grounds of higher principle — such as Zola, the novelists Octave Mirbeau and Anatole France, the mathematicians Henri Poincaré and Jacques Hadamard, and the librarian of the École Normale Supérieure, Lucien Herr. Constantin Mille, a Romanian Socialist writer and émigré in Paris, identified the anti-Dreyfusard camp with a "militarist dictatorship".[7]

In 1906 the Chamber of Deputies overwhelmingly approved measures to rehabilitate and promote Dreyfus and Picquart in the Army. (Picquart became a general before WW1 and even held the position of Minister of War in a later Clemenceau government in 1906.) War Minister Général de Galliffet, also in 1906, formally put an end to the Dreyfus Affair during an intervention in the Chamber of Deputies which ended with the famous phrase: "L'incident est clos " which translates as "The incident is closed ". However, anti-Dreyfusards in the civilian realm never really ceased to denounce the Dreyfus affair to further their own political ends.

The factions in the Dreyfus affair remained in place for decades afterwards. The far right remained a potent force, as did the moderate liberals. The liberal victory played an important role in pushing the far right to the fringes of French politics. It also prompted legislation such as a 1905 law separating church and state. The coalition of partisan anti-Dreyfusards remained together, but turned to other causes. Groups such as Maurras' Action Française, formed during the affair, endured for decades. The right-wing Vichy Regime was composed to some extent of old anti-Dreyfusards and their descendants. The Vichy Regime would later close its eyes to the arrest of Dreyfus's granddaughter, Madeleine, by the Gestapo and to her deportation and death at Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz, in January 1944.[8] [9]

Lucie Dreyfus, the loyal wife of Alfred, wrote many letters of comfort to him during his exile. She had also written the Vatican for mercy, but her letter was never answered. It was she who appealed to Émile Zola for help. Lucie survived the Holocaust by changing her identity and hiding in Southern France at a Catholic convent under the name of Mme Duteil. She died in Paris at age 76, on December 14, 1945.[10]

In 1985, President François Mitterrand commissioned a statue of Dreyfus by sculptor Louis Mitelberg to be installed at the École Militaire, but the Minister of Defense refused to display it although Alfred Dreyfus had been rehabilitated into the Army and fully exonerated in 1906.

The Dreyfus Affair, Anti-Semitism and the birth of Zionism

The Hungarian-Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl had been assigned to report on the trial and its aftermath. Soon afterward, Herzl wrote The Jewish State (1896) and founded the World Zionist Organization, which called for the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine. The anti-semitism and injustice revealed in France by the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus had a radicalizing effect on Herzl, demonstrating to him that Jews, despite the Enlightenment and Jewish assimilation, could never hope for fair treatment in European society. Historically, it is true that the Dreyfus injustice was not the initial motivation for Herzl's actions. However it did go a long way to keep motivating him further into promoting Zionism. His persistent activism during his lifetime eventually led to the creation of a Jewish state long after his death.

In the Middle East, the Muslim Arab press was sympathetic to the falsely accused Captain Dreyfus, and criticized the persecution of Jews in France.[11]

Not all Jews saw the Dreyfus Affair as evidence of anti-semitism in France, however. It was also viewed as the opposite. The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas often cited the words of his father: "A country that tears itself apart to defend the honor of a small Jewish captain is somewhere worth going."[12]

Centennial commemoration

On 12 July 2006, President Jacques Chirac held an official state ceremony marking the centenary of Dreyfus's official rehabilitation. This was held in the presence of the living descendants of both Émile Zola and Alfred Dreyfus. The event took place in the same cobblestone courtyard of Paris' École Militaire, where Capitaine Dreyfus had been officially stripped of his officer's rank. Chirac stated that "the combat against the dark forces of intolerance and hate is never definitively won," and called Dreyfus "an exemplary officer" and a "patriot who passionately loved France." The French National Assembly also held a memorial ceremony of the centennial marking the end of the Affair. This was held in remembrance of the 1906 laws that had reintegrated and promoted both Dreyfus and Picquart at the end of the Dreyfus Affair.

Films and theatre

Films:

A British-made television film of 1991, Prisoner of Honor, directed by Ken Russell, focuses on the efforts of Colonel Picquart to have the sentence of Alfred Dreyfus overturned. (Colonel Picquart was played by American actor Richard Dreyfuss, who says he is a descendant of Alfred Dreyfus).

Theatre:

Literature

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ The term post-dates the start of the affair.
  2. ↑ George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 150.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Doise, 1984
  4. ↑ Bach, 2004, Duclert, 2006
  5. ↑ (Doise, 1984)
  6. ↑ Rubenstein, Richard L., and Roth, John K. (rev. ed. 2003). Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy, p. 84. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN 0664223532.
  7. ↑ (Romanian) Constantin Antip, "Émile Zola: «Adevărul este în marş»" ("Émile Zola: «Truth Is Marching On»"), in Magazin Istoric
  8. ↑ http://www.floridaholocaustmuseum.org/Newsletter/FHM_winter_2005.pdf
  9. ↑ Carroll, James. (2001) Constantine's Sword. p.470 [1]
  10. ↑ Carroll, James. (2001) Constantine's Sword. p.471 [2]
  11. ↑ Lewis, Bernard (1986). Semites and Anti-Semites. Pg. 133
  12. ↑ Secularism, the French & Alfred Dreyfus - July 7, 2006 - The New York Sun

References

External links

Further reading